ABSTRACT
About the time Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were attracting attention in Europe, the Americans, who had already fostered a literary Renaissance with the Mathers, Hawthorne, Dickenson, Melville, Whitman, and Jewett, were venturing into philosophy. Under the editorship of Hegelian William Torrey Harris (1855-1909), the Journal of Speculative Philosophy fi rst appeared in 1867. While discussion of German philosophers dominated in the academy, any mention of “American philosophy” today would likely suggest the school of philosophy called “pragmatism.” In an essay entitled “Pragmatic American,” which appeared in New Republic in 1922, John Dewey, probably the foremost exponent of that school of thought, does concede that “pragmatism was born upon American soil” (MW 13, 307), implying that it is the only school of philosophy with specifi cally American roots. The seemingly defensive tone of the essay may owe something to what Dewey perceived to be Bertrand Russell’s condescending “suggestion that pragmatism is the intellectual equivalent of commercialism,” which Dewey did not take lightly. Russell’s diatribe, Dewey responded, was the intellectual equivalent of saying “that English neo-realism is a refl ection of the aristocratic snobbery of the English.” Russell should have known that the founders of the movement, Charles Peirce and William James, for instance, were by no means “conspicuous for conformity to commercial standards.” In fact, the opposite was probably the case.
